DEMJ5104_nothing_to_fear_report_140217_WEBv1

1 Great Britain

1 Great Britain to vote Leave. 67 In this light, the ‘take back control’ slogan of the Leave campaign takes on a whole new significance. Optimism To the vast polling data to come out of the referendum, we might add one more predictive factor to Inglehart and Norris’s list of value orientations predicting a vote for populist parties in Europe (identifying as right of centre, espousing authoritarian values, having little trust in national and global governance, and being anti-immigration). Ashcroft polling and British Election Study data suggest that in addition to social attitudes being a strong determinant of referendum voter choice, there is some evidence that a voter’s level of optimism and pessimism regarding the past and the future of the UK is strongly correlated with their referendum vote choice. Leave and Remain voters were presented with pairs of opposing statements indicating pessimism or optimism in a variety of circumstances, and asked which statement they most strongly agreed with. Among Leave voters, there was a 22 per cent net agreement that ‘for most children growing up in Britain today, life will be worse than it was for their parents’, while among Remain voters there was a 4 per cent net agreement with the opposing statement, ‘for most children growing up today, life will be better than it was for their parents’. 68 As well as being less optimistic about the future, Leave voters were more positive about the past than Remain voters. In Ashcroft’s polling, 73 per cent of Remain voters felt that ‘overall, life in Britain today is better than it was 30 years ago’; 58 per cent of Leave voters, by contrast, felt that ‘overall, life in Britain today is worse than it was 30 years ago’. Both sides thought that economic and social changes would bring more threats than opportunities, but to differing degrees: 42 per cent of Leave voters but only 20 per cent of Remain voters agreed. 69 The British Election Study asked similar questions, with similar results. They found, for instance, that among those who strongly disagreed with the statement that things used to be better in Britain in the past, only 15 per cent voted Leave. 70

69 External and campaign factors The predictive value of the demographic, geographic and attitudinal variables discussed thus far suggests that some were always more likely to vote Leave, and some always more likely to vote Remain. Still, like all human behaviour, voting behaviour is complex and changeable: our decisions in the voting booth are not predetermined by structural factors, nor do values and attitudes automatically yield a political preference. To fully capture how people voted on 23 June, any analysis must also consider the influences on people in the run-up to the referendum: the media representations, the campaign leaders and the friends and family they spoke to. Media representations It is difficult to ascertain the extent to which the media influenced voters in the referendum for the same reason that it is difficult to ascertain how the media affect voters in any election or popular vote; media representations are just one of many factors that contribute to a voter’s eventual choice and many claimed to have always known how they were going to vote. 71 This being said, some studies have provided evidence that media framing of public discourse around specific EU policies can affect the extent to which those policies are seen positively or negatively. 72 Moreover, there is evidence to suggest that among national newspapers in the UK, the Leave campaign enjoyed a number of advantages. A study by Loughborough University’s Centre for Research in Communication and Culture released two weeks before the vote found that, based on analysis of media articles from the ten largest newspapers in the UK, favourability of reporting towards either the Leave or the Remain camps was largely balanced within the sample of 1,127. However, when circulation and thus number of probable article ‘views’ was taken into account, only 18 per cent of the sample were pro-Remain, while 82 per cent were pro-Leave (discounting neutral articles). 73 Similar research undertaken by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, published one month before the referendum vote, which covered two sample days of coverage a week for the first